Historical crisis enables the existential self to be freed from individualism

Evidence

Sartre would try to capture the mood of the crisis in The Reprieve, the second volume of his Roads of Freedom sequence — not published until 1945, but set during the crucial week of 23–30 September 1938. Each of his characters struggles to adjust to the idea that their future may be curtailed and that nothing will be the same again. Sartre slips from one person’s thoughts to another’s, in a stream-of-consciousness method borrowed from the novels of John Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf. The young character Boris (based on Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost) calculates how long he is likely to survive in the army when war begins, and thus how many omelettes he can expect to eat before dying. In a crucial moment, as everyone gathers to hear Hitler speak on the radio, Sartre draws back from the scene to show us all of France, then all of Germany, and all of Europe. ‘A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 403 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

In all these 1940s novels, stories and essays, the dominant mood was not so much one of post-traumatic exhaustion as of excitement. The world had fallen to pieces, but for that very reason almost anything could now be done with it. It made for a thrilling and frightening mixture — which was just the combination of emotions that characterised the first wave of post-war existentialism in general. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 529 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sartre novelized existential freedom through collective crisis in The Reprieve — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 403; Post-war existentialism thrived on the excitement of a shattered world — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 529; Postwar literary avant-garde aimed at necessity freed from the individual. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2239 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre novelized existential freedom through collective crisis in The Reprieve #exemplifies (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 403
• Post-war existentialism thrived on the excitement of a shattered world #exemplifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 529